1CoolerMaster Elite 335 PC CaseThe end of regular PC price drops?

I reg­u­larly build PCs for people, and have recently been look­ing at a high end spec for someone. I star­ted, as I often do, by look­ing at what I’d got for a high end sys­tem about a year ago, to see if it was worth mov­ing up the the new gen­er­a­tion, or if a sub­stan­tial drop in the older spec made it tempt­ing to repeat. In the past the year old sys­tem has always been sub­stan­tially cheap­er, so I was quite sur­prised to find that this time it was­n’t. First, let’s look at the core parts of the sys­tem — then, and now. I’ll also com­pare this to a new gen­er­a­tion equi­val­ent to see what that looks like.

Year old specold spec price Sept-2012old spec price Sept-2013New spec priceNew gen­er­a­tion spec
Giga­byte Z77-DS3H£70.91£68.96£87.64MSI Z87
OCZ Ver­tex 4 120Gb£89.99£84.99£84.99no change
Core i7 3770K 3.5GHz£259.45£260.93£268.88Core i7 4770K 3.5GHz
2x8Gb cor­sair 1600 CL10£69.77£101.69£101.69no change
£490.12£516.57£543.20

Ouch! So the new gen­er­a­tion sys­tem is £53.10 more expens­ive (about 10%) but the old spec, bought today, would be more expens­ive than it was a year agoThis can­’t be accoun­ted for by 1 volat­ile item (like RAM or HDD), because whilst the RAM has increased by £30 (over 40%), none of the oth­er com­pon­ents has dropped by an appre­ciable amount. It looks like Intel’s dom­in­ance of the CPU world is mean­ing speed improve­ments are much slower to arrive, and their older CPUs aren’t fall­ing in price. This in turn means mother­boards and RAM also aren’t devalu­ing either.

The full spec

Lets look and see if prices for oth­er parts of the sys­tem have dropped, for those look­ing to build an entire system

Year old specold spec price Sept-2012old spec price Sept-2013New spec priceNew gen­er­a­tion spec
Giga­byte Z77-DS3H£70.91£68.96£87.64MSI Z87
OCZ Ver­tex 4 120Gb£89.99£84.99£84.99no change
Core i7 3770K 3.5GHz£259.45£260.93£268.88Core i7 4770K 3.5GHz
2x8Gb cor­sair 1600 CL10£69.77£101.69£101.69no change
Seag­ate 2Tb 7200 64Mb£79.98£69.99£69.99no change
CM Élite 334U case£32.20£34.46£34.46no change
Cor­sair CX 500W PSU£46.66£44.61£44.61no change
LiteOn 22x DVD#RW£13.13£12.29£12.29LiteOn 24x DVD#RW
HD 7770 1Gb DDR5£98.00£75.51£75.51no change
£760.08£753.43£780.06

So the old spec has dropped by £7 over­all. A new gen­er­a­tion machine, which is largely the same spec, is £20 more. So really, things haven’t changed at all. In a year!

Two lessons learned

1. Giv­en that there is no obvi­ous reas­on for the cur­rent trend to change, now is not a good time to “wait for prices to fall” If you’re look­ing for new kit then now really is as good a time as any to invest.

2. Desktop PC innov­a­tion looks to have col­lapsed as the mar­ket has moved to mobile (i.e. laptop, tab­let and phone).  Expect future gen­er­a­tions to offer the same (or very sim­il­ar) per­form­ance with lower power con­sump­tion. This means older high per­form­ance desktop CPUs will con­tin­ue to hold their value, as the desktop upgrade mar­ket has­n’t ever been driv­en by a need to reduce power use.

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